


A Family Matter

by lagaydugevaudan



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Gen, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Leitner-Robinson AU, i think that's all!, jon is 8 in this. child. babey., warning for mention of spiders?, what if they were......his parents...
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-06-13
Updated: 2019-08-20
Packaged: 2020-05-07 05:25:46
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,490
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19202791
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lagaydugevaudan/pseuds/lagaydugevaudan
Summary: "Jonathan Leitner-Robinson was never a happy child."





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Kalgalen](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kalgalen/gifts).



Jonathan Leitner-Robinson was never a happy child. Not uncared for, mind you, both his parents and his grandmother tried their best to raise him with all the love they were capable of giving. In his grandmother's case, there wasn't much parently love left to give, and as for his parents… They were always busy, mum with her job as the archives, dad with his library, his “passion project” as he'd refer to it in mixed company, which was pretty much anyone outside of him, his wife, and his assistants. Jon never resented them for it, as it was all he'd ever known, and since he wasn't particularly popular amongst other children, he had nothing to compare his rather narrow worldview to.

There were upsides to his parent's job, though, and this was something he could compare to the other kids. He was an avid reader, with a sharp memory for detail and a profound distaste for reading anything he felt he'd already read before. This made him difficult to please, even when he'd started going on weekly trips to the library and coming back his bag bulging with books he would carefully select. The upside to their job was that they'd always bring him back a book whenever they went away on a business trip, which was quite often for people in professions one might consider sedentary, though the strangeness of it never crossed Jon's mind.

The books his parents brought him were as starkly different as they were. His mother would bring him back journals, dictionaries, fiction and history books, even the odd handwritten diary every now and then, which Jon handled with the utmost care up until he'd finished with it and he discarded it as he did the offered. His father, in contrast, would bring him beautifully printed first editions, heavy leather-bound tomes, and looking back on it Jon could swear some of them had been genuine medieval manuscripts. Not that he'd cared, at the time. It was never the format of the book that mattered to him, only the content.

A few years in the future, when e-readers were popularized, Jon would almost discard print entirely, up until he realized that digital simply wouldn't keep up with the... specificities the texts his job would require him to read.

All this was to say that Jon was a lonely, slightly unhappy child—though thoroughly unaware that he was lacking in the “familial love” department—and that he was quickly running out of options of books to read. By the time he was 8 years old, he'd gone through the library, not even bothering with reading the same author twice, and even his globe-trotting father was having trouble finding things he hasn't read. His mother was more and more absorbed by her archival work, and his grandmother was no help, buying him anything she'd find in local charity shops, yielding very few books he actually cared to give a try to.

So when his father asked him if he wanted to visit his library, Jon could barely contain his excitement. You see, _Dad's Library_ , as he referred to it in his internal monologue, was strictly off-limits to him, and he hadn't been privy to a single book inside. He tried to school his glee down into a semi-apathetic nod the best an 8-year-old can attempt such a thing, and was shaking his hands at his sides in excitement when his father took him to the massive oak door that separated the family house and the library, reached into his collar to pull a key on a chain, and unlocked the door.

Inside were… books, as Jon had expected. Rows upon rows of books, but this was unlike any library he'd ever been to before. The manner in which the books were arranged seemed random, almost haphazard, but he also felt a purposefulness to it, in the spirals and towers and piles of books, even what he could only describe as an altar here or there. He also realized that the library that could be viewed from the outside was just the upper level, and several winding stone staircases in different parts of the room led deeper down.

Jon gaped at the sight before him, and when he looked up at his father, the man was beaming. He'd patted Jon on the head, and sighed, telling him that he knew Jon would love it, that Gertrude thought he was too young, but—

As he said this, a loud crash came from one of the staircases, followed by a string of loud words Jon didn’t understand. His father sighed.

“It seems,” he said, his tone almost conspiratorial, “that my assistants can't be left alone for more than an hour without tearing the place down. Can I trust you to go back upstairs into the house while I handle this?”

Jon had nodded solemnly at this, pride warming his chest as his father entrusted him with something, however small.

“I need you to promise to not touch any of the books. Can you do that for me?”

Jon nodded again, eager to please, and earned himself another pat on the head, and just like that he was alone, surrounded by books.

Hundreds, thousands of books he hadn't read yet, and the knowledge suddenly hit him that most of the books here had never been read at all. Where the knowledge came from, Jon had not known, but in his 8-year-old mind, it made perfect sense that these books weren't just forbidden. They were _unknown_.

He stepped gingerly towards one of the shelves and felt his resolve not to touch them falter as he read titles that he did not recognize. Again, the classifying system struck him as odd, being used to more conventional libraries, but he supposed if his father kept gardening books with archaeology, he wasn't going to question it.

All at once, reading the titles on the shelves—his father hasn't said anything about looking around—he was hit with a particular feeling of wrongness. Like he'd trespassed, somehow and the owner of the house had just noticed him. A deep panic seized him, like nothing he'd ever felt before, and before he knew what he was doing he was running up the stairs to the oak door, slamming it behind him as he rejoined the safety of his house.

He breathed heavily, and sat down on the floor to calm himself, when he noticed his hands weren't empty. He wasn't carrying a book when he'd entered, he was sure of it, but there it was, gripped tightly against his chest.

Panic seized him again as he thought just how mad his father would be if he found he’d broken his promise. The way his brow would furrow in disappointment. He wouldn't trust Jon with anything ever again. The idea had him shaking, but even in his state, he couldn't help but be aware of the book.

It was a square thing, like a child's book, meant to teach farm animals or the alphabet, but where the cardboard should have been bright and colorful, it was black and white, the title "A Guest for Mister Spider" engraved—carved, Jon thought—into the cover, surrounded by webs that looked like they'd been drawn by a child. He was quite certain he'd never seen a book like this before. He turned it around, expecting a summary, a quote, and was met with a crude drawing of a spider, presumably the eponymous Mister Spider. His stomach lurched at the image, at its swollen, bulging abdomen and the many eyes that covered what might pass as a face.  
  
The spider was wearing a bowler hat, and Jon found that he couldn't tear his eyes away from that deep stain of red. He hated the hat more than anything else on that picture.

Without thinking, more like a muscle spasm or a reflex than any conscious decision he could have made, he opened the book.

The first page was a book-plate, engraved with the words “From The Library of Jurgen Leitner”, and, though he didn't yet know it, those very words would haunt his nightmares for years to come.

 _Knock knock_ , the book said.

_Who is it, Mister Spider?_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I hope you enjoyed this! Might write more, might not, given that I'm in the middle of finals.  
> Anyway I wrote this at 2am after a conversation with @kalgalen where we were like...what if they actually were his parents.....  
> I'm @juicywizards on tumblr if you want to check out my TMA art!


	2. Chapter 2

After his encounter with his first of what he would later come to refer to as a “Leitner”—though the flinch at the name never left, no matter how much he told himself it didn't affect him anymore—Jon’s parents decided that it would be safer for him to go live with his grandmother. His mother explained that it was work-related, she wasn’t home enough to take care of him, and it wasn’t permanent. His father… He hadn’t seen his father much after the incident anyway, though whether that meant he resented Jon of felt guilty for leaving him alone, Jon would never know.

The choice was out of his hands anyway, he moved in with his grandmother in the following months and not much changed save his street name and the view from his window. He didn’t even have to change schools, and nobody outside the family was aware he wasn’t living with his parents anymore.

 

In the years he lived with his grandmother, Jon developed, on top of the trauma of seeing one of his father’s assistants get taken by a monstrous spider from a book, a near-pathological fear of spiders, and later on a hunger for anything supernatural, which meant he spent his every waking hour devouring anything he could on the subject. Surprisingly, his grades didn't suffer from it, not that he'd ever been anything other than remarkably average where academics were concerned. It wasn't that he wasn't  _ good _ at school, he just didn't care enough to put in the small amount of work it would have taken him to be at the top of his class.

His parents would send him a monthly allowance in the mail, and he’d sometimes get a more hefty sum for christmas--though they sometimes seemed to forget--that his grandmother insisted he save for college.

He had no contact with them outside from that and a few postcards his mother--Gertrude, he called her now--sent him from whatever odd location she would find herself in. He kept all of them in a cardboard box under his bed, but they stung even more than the complete silence from Jurgen: they could have sent him letters, could have contacted him, but they chose not to.

_ Because they hated him _ , something at the back of his mind supplied, and, given that he’d never been given any indication that this wasn’t true, he believed it.

 

He graduated from Oxford with a master's in English and an awkward-ex-turned-best-friend to show for it. When he received the news that the library had burned down, that his father was missing and presumed dead, he tried to tell himself he felt nothing but contempt for the man who had ruined his life with a book and had been all too keen to get rid of him, but deep down…

It didn't matter anyway, and his already sparse correspondence with his ever-recluse mother dwindled down until he was no longer sure whether or not she was still alive and couldn't bring himself to care.

 

For his twenty-third birthday, Jonathan Leitner-Robinson changed his name to Jonathan Sims, an old family name, and effectively wrote his parents out of is life.

That was, until he got the letter from the Magnus Institute.

It was innocuous enough, though he recognized the seal from having seen his mother open hundreds of similar letters during his childhood, and something not unlike nostalgia panged at his heart.

“Addressed to Jonathan Sims”, it read, and that had been enough for him to open it, the fact that it just might not have anything to do with his mother. Maybe they were just informing him of a job opening. After all, he'd cast a rather wide net with online applications, and, although he was definitely not going to accept a job that would entail working with Gertrude, he was getting rather desperate. Retail had… It just hadn’t agreed with his sensory processing disorder.

As a matter of fact, the letter did have to do with his mother, but not in the way he'd expected.

“The staff of the Magnus Institute, London, would like to present their sincerest condolences,”, something something tragic accident...

_ His mother had died and this was how he was learning about it. _

The thought hit him like a freight train, and he fell to his knees, scratching into his arms, into the familiar long-faded scars of his childhood nightmares. He felt tears pool up in his eyes and he didn't  _ care _ , he didn't even know the woman anymore, never had, really why was he so—

 

Georgie had found him there, still in the entrance of their shared flat, the letter crumpled, but still held tight. He didn't know how much time had passed, only knew that she’d led him to the couch, made some tea, brought him a blanket without even asking what was wrong. She was always too good for him, Jon thought bitterly as he let himself be babied by her, not able to processing words yet, all his energy going into keeping himself held in the vague shape of a human being.

She’d sat down with him, and he'd told her everything, from the spider book to his last name down to the job offer the letter had also supplied. They had an opening, he laughed bitterly, still unable to process that despite his parent's many faults—including, but not limited to dropping him into his grandmother’s care and never giving him an ounce of affection—he was now effectively an orphan.

She believed him, somehow, understood even, and he ended up taking the job against her advice. He was incredibly underqualified, and was certain they'd only hire him as an archivist because of his connection to the Leitners—as if having shared a name with them for twenty-four years meant he was able to understand them, handle them without danger--and because the previous archivist was literally his mother.

 

So he started working at the Magnus Institute, and if his grandmother had any complaints, she didn’t voice them, happy to mostly ignore Jon’s existence now that he wasn’t in her care anymore. Jon couldn’t even resent her for it, he’d been a terrible child and a worse teenager, and he’d become accustomed to people leaving him one way or the other.

His job mostly consisted of reading statements and making sense of Gertrude’s horrendous archiving system--really, you’d think an archivist would have been good at this, but the archives were a  _ mess _ . 

In a way, the time he spent deciphering her tight, ridiculously small handwriting and cross-referencing her notes to find missing statements was the closest he’d ever been to his family.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Me? Continuing something??? Wild


End file.
